Shayol, Summer 1979: Michael Bishop and Howard Waldrop

At the beginning of what turned out to be a hectic and travel-filled holiday season, I started Philip Roth's novel The Professor of Desire and found it unengaging, so much so that I put it aside halfway through, inaugurating an unexpected break from reading fiction that lasted over a month.  On Sunday, the seventh day of this new year, in a hotel room in Maumee, OH, I again opened up my disintegrating paperback of The P of D and made a half-hearted effort to continue it, an operation quickly abandoned.  Is this merely a response to Roth's mediocre novel, or am I burnt out, totally sick of reading fiction?  I guess we'll see over the coming weeks.

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In any event, today we have some fiction to talk about.  Monday morning, at the Maumee Antiques Mall, I purchased a copy of the Summer 1979 issue of Shayol, a periodical edited by Pat Cadigan; the masthead says Shayol is "published irregularly" and isfdb indicates seven issues appeared between 1977 and 1985--my issue is the third.

Shayol--wikipedia favors the spelling "Sheol"--is of course the underworld of death as described in Jewish thought and literature; the same spelling used as the title of this magazine is used by Cordwainer Smith in his quite fine story "A Planet Named Shayol" which we here at MPorcius Fiction Log read back in 2015 and "highly recommended."   I bought this magazine because Tanith Lee, Richard Corben, and Stephen Fabian, whom I very much like, and Michael Bishop and Tim Kirk, whom I like moderately, and Howard Waldrop, about whom I am curious, all are named on the cover, and a quick look on my phone suggested Shayol is not available at the internet archive.  Unfortunately, the Lee contribution turns out to be something I've already read and blogged about, the Cyrion sword and sorcery story "A Hero at the Gates," and the only Corben material is his illustration to that Cyrion tale.  Characteristically, the Corben illustration features full frontal male nudity; this penis perhaps balances out the numerous bare female breasts on offer in the magazine.

Among the topless ladies gracing Shayol's pages is the woman in the inside front cover ad for the art book Alicia Austin's Age of Dreams.  The image in this ad, and Robert Haas' capsule review of A A A of D on page 35, hint that Austin's work is a pastiche of the work of such worthies as MPorcius fave Alphonse Mucha, but a competent pastiche.  (In particular, compare Austin's dragon to the dragon on Mucha's famous poster for Lorenzacchio, and Austin's female figure to any of a dozen of Mucha's women.)  Stephen Fabian's contributions also prominently feature the female bosom, but the best of the five pages his work appears on, moody page 50, has no sexual content and instead wins admiration for its strong vertical composition and effective generation of atmosphere. 

Besides the art, which on the whole is quite good, and the fiction, Shayol offers a wealth of features and departments.  I skimmed the editorials; Cadigan in hers attacks religion, while Arnie Fenner in his attacks the police.  A quick glance at Phil Bolick's essay leads me to suppose it is meant to be funny; Phil informs us that the physics and biology in Star Wars, Flash Gordon and A Princess of Mars aren't realistic.  And it looks like Marty Ketchum uses his column of reviews to express his love for Harlan Ellison and Stephen King.  A little relief from all this banality can be found in the letters column, in a piece of correspondence from Gregory Benford I actually read word for word.  Benford attacks Lester del Rey ("ignorant...doesn't know enough to distinguish good prose from bad...") and suggests del Rey and many other people who review SF are keeping SF "locked in a strait jacket" by promoting action adventure stories.  Benford does have nice things to say about Michael Bishop, Tom Reamy and Ray Bradbury, however.

Alright, now let's tackle the two pieces of fiction in this issue of Shayol that interest me, those by Michael Bishop and Howard Waldrop.

"Love's Heresy" by Michael Bishop 

Bubba the eight-year-old farm boy accompanies his father into town, where Dad is refused credit at the hardware store.  They also hear a speech given by a man who was expelled from divinity school; this joker propounds his theory that the Earth is a false world, a mirror image of what is happening in heaven--if you are a drunken lout here on Earth, your double in heaven--the real you--is a sober decent man.  On the other hand, people who behave decently here are "really" foul malefactors who are behaving viciously up in heaven.  When you die, you are united with your true self.

This theory seems kind of stupid--supposing that people's circumstances are as diverse and behavior as particular in heaven as on Earth is nonsensical enough, but the twist of indicating that those who are decent here on Earth are in reality villains who are misbehaving in heaven, while Earth's murderers and thieves are in fact kind and generous, raises the level of insanity and obviously seems to encourage anti-social behavior.  This guy's theology does the opposite of what we expect religion to do, which is to make sense of the apparently chaotic universe, comfort people, and encourage social stability and civil tranquility, and he essentially admits it, saying that he seeks not to prescribe behavior, but merely describe the workings of the universe.

Anyway, the divinity school drop out's theories have the effect you might expect.  A year or so later, Bubba's mother dies of cancer.  Dad builds an elaborate metal sphere, larger than a man, from scrap metal and hangs it from the ceiling of his shop.  He straps Bubba to the bottom of the sphere and then releases his creation from its chains so that it falls and crushes his child to death.  When asked why he would do such a monstrous thing, he says that by crushing his son under a heavy weight here on Earth, he was enabling the real Bubba in heaven to fly--Dad is confident Bubba is happily flying right now.  

Bubba's father is confined to a mental hospital, the heretical divinity student is murdered by unknown persons, and the giant sphere, which resembles a work of modern art, is put on display in the center of town; people soon forget that it is the product of insanity and an instrument of murder.

This story is unsatisfying and leaves the reader feeling uneasy because every character with some kind of agency thinks and acts irrationally and inexplicably, the opposite of how we might expect them to.  Maybe that is Bishop's point, that the universe is chaotic and people generally behave in ways that defy logic and seem at cross purposes to their goals (or what we suppose their goals should be.)  Another possibility is that this story is a sort of warning to society's elites that they should be careful of what they say to people, because many individuals are stupid, broken-hearted or otherwise vulnerable and need guidance, and if influential people offer poor direction then society will descend into chaos.  A related theory is that the failed divinity student is the Devil--after all, he quotes Scripture to support his reckless theorizing, reminding us of the Shakespearean adage.

"Love's Heresy," which I'm judging mildly good, would be reprinted in the Bishop collections Close Encounters with the Deity (1986) and A Few Last Words For the Late Immortals (2021).

"Horror, We Got" by Howard Waldrop

I am familiar with the Waldrop name, but for some reason I've never mentioned him on this blog and apparently never read anything by him.

"Horror, We Got" is a pretty wild story, what I might call a shock satire that is adorned with graphic violence and sex.  Our narrator is an Israeli intelligence operative who does the wettest of wet work across the widest possible range of operations.  You see, a Jewish genius and Holocaust survivor figured out how to travel through time in the late 1940s, and by the 1990s the Israeli government had developed a time machine.  Now, in the early 2000s, Israel, having sent its agents back in time to manipulate governments, economies, and social and cultural movements, covertly rules the world, and the secretive leaders of Israel have set upon a mind-blowingly extravagant course of action--exacting revenge upon the gentiles who have oppressed and abused the Jewish people throughout history by making the libelous lies told about Jews into a reality!  

Our narrator describes some of his and other agents' missions in the past, which include murdering gentiles in order to trigger pogroms, as well as oral sex on off hours between operations back in the story's present.  Waldrop's story has a sort of jocular tone, and of course is an attack on bigots, but I think we can also read it as a rumination on such topics as the justness of vengeance, how hating instead of forgiving those who have wronged you can turn you into a monster, and how expecting the worst from people can be a self-destructive self-fulfilling prophecy.  If one were inclined to criticize Waldrop, one could say that, like how all those Law and Order TV shows cater to people's fascination with kinky sex under the cover of condemning perverts, "Horror, We Got"'s status as a satire allows Waldrop to traffic in ethnic jokes and racial stereotypes and appeal to readers' lust for blood as well as their self-righteousness.  

I appreciate stories that are crazy and unexpected, and judge this piece as "acceptable," so maybe I'll read more Waldrop stories in the future.  But if all of them push conventional liberal themes while trying to be funny, well, that could get pretty old pretty fast.

"Horror, We Got" would reappear in the Waldrop collection Howard Who? (1986) and in Strange Things in Close Up (a 1989 omnibus of Howard Who? and another Waldrop collection.)  Strange Things in Close Up is available at the internet archive and I read Waldrop's intro to "Horror, We Got" in which he describes the genesis and publication history of the story and brags that, when he read it at a convention, people were at first dumbfounded but he won them over and they applauded him.

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More horrific magazine fiction next time on MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be casting our net in waters stocked some forty years earlier than the depths of those we plumbed today.  Stay tuned.